


Let's Make Our Own Word*

by heliianth



Series: Writing a Dictionary [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bucky Barnes Is a Good Bro, Child Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Good Aunt Natasha™, Hurt Peter Parker, Hydra Peter Parker, ITS ALSO A REWRITE BABIES, Irondad & Spiderson, Kinda?, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Peter Parker Acts Like a Spider, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro, Stockholm Syndrome, Timeline What Timeline, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, this won't be just a whump fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22340695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliianth/pseuds/heliianth
Summary: * or, a rewrite of a fic by the same name. brand new for 2020!“He still must learn how to act around you, regardless. You do not forget your place around him even when he speaks to you, do you understand?”Another gesture with his hand permitted him to reply. He nodded once. “Yes, sir.”“Alright,” the man let out a slight huff of air as he sat back in the chair behind the desk, tapping the wood with manicured fingernails. “You know your correct volume. Mission report: July 23rd, 2016.”Weapon Eleven is Hydra's most recent Asset, and their only successful one. He's exactly what he should be: a Weapon. Or at least, he tries his very hardest to be.He's not.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Peter Parker, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Natasha Romanov, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, more added later - Relationship
Series: Writing a Dictionary [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608157
Comments: 33
Kudos: 300





	1. i. july 29 2016

**Author's Note:**

> aaaaa hi y'all! 'tis here!!
> 
> you can check out the old fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17308730/chapters/40713797  
> (but i hate my old writing so actually please dont)
> 
> this one's gonna be different, which im sure y'all will be able to tell, but i'm still basing it off of the core of the old story. hopefully i hit my mark this time.
> 
> please enjoy! and definitely go send my girl colorworld on AO3 some love for being an amazing beta for this beast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaa hi y'all! 'tis here!!
> 
> you can check out the old fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17308730/chapters/40713797  
> (but i hate my old writing so actually please dont)
> 
> this one's gonna be different, which im sure y'all will be able to tell, but i'm still basing it off of the core of the old story. hopefully i hit my mark this time.
> 
> please enjoy! and definitely go send my girl colorworld on AO3 some love for being an amazing beta for this beast.

The doorknob itself was an elegant thing, tended to like something significant enough to be so polished. Despite the knowledge that it was spotless, the color was a grimy and ruined golden that was distinct against the blank white office. He couldn’t tear his eyes off of it even though it was an unexciting and mundane object in a room full of nothing but secrets. 

However, those secretive papers were the same color as everything else, ordinary and sanitary and minimalistic. They didn’t engage him enough to gather the courage to reach and touch.

One guard’s boot scuffed against the floor, and Weapon turned his head towards the new sound. The loud exhales and the purring of two hearts whose drumming never matched each other no matter how many times one of them skipped a beat was growing monotonous, especially after the eventfulness that came with missions. The same guard cleared his esophagus and glanced away from Weapon. His hand shifted on the holster against his hip, almost nervous. 

He sounded like a rabbit, Weapon thought after struggling to pin down what he was thinking of. Rabbits didn’t have guns, they burrowed away from foxes and keen-eyed hawks. Rabbits were defenseless, skittish creatures. The television said as much.

Who was the fox if such a big man had the pulse of a rodent?

The answer came with little effort. 

“Stop that,” Rabbit told him, lips tilting downwards. Harsh wrinkles lined his mouth; one, two, three gorges in aged skin, like scars. They caused his face look antique.

“I told you to stop the staring,” Rabbit barked. “Don’t you listen?” 

Rabbit’s friend swallowed, heartbeat speeding up. The taste of unease permeated the air like smoke from a signal fire. It was not unlike chlorine gas, so pungent and distinct that it clung to all it touched. The muzzle covering his lower face obscured the way his nose scrunched ever so slightly.

“Huh?” the guard prodded, unremarkable grey eyes insistent on an answer. He averted his gaze, jaw clenching. Rabbit’s boldness was an identifying sign of a new arrival. 

A modest, ghostly smile graced his lips when the doorknob rattled. It faded as soon as it emerged. Rabbit sent him a sour glance, and then the door opened without a noise.

His Administrator’s shoes clicked against the tiled floors like keyboard keys forming an important sentence. He offered neither Weapon nor Rabbit any acknowledgement, just smoothed back unruly hair and shrugged off an expensive business jacket onto an immaculate desk. Only then, comfortable, did he turn to the rest of the room.

“Dismissed,” he waved his hand at Rabbit and the other guard like they were a nuisance, mosquitoes. “And for the record, Agent Hart, it just doesn’t listen to you.” 

Rabbit was a more apt name than Hart was. It fit snug to the man’s impression, not too small or too big; a perfect glove. They both fled with haste, touching the other side of that spotless doorknob on the way out. The door closed quietly. Someone would have to cleanse away the oils and fingerprints.

His Administrator beckoned for him to rise with a simple gesture and a sigh, an order that he followed without hesitancy. Goosebumps perched on his arms, was the sigh directed at him or something else? “Take that thing off,” he said, tucking his hands in the pockets of ironed dress pants.

He reached behind his neck and thumbed the latch that released his muzzle, sliding it off. The sterile air tasted so fresh, it was hard to resist opening his mouth and gulping it in. 

“Does Agent Hart speak to you like that regularly?” When he remained mute, his Administrator gave him permission to speak with an approving glint in his eyes. 

His tongue ran over a healed split lip for a fraction of a second before he inhaled to answer, “No, sir.” 

Voices were fickle things, made worse by his sensitive ears, but he’d grown used to his own. It was a chameleon’s voice, and he didn’t mind that at all. American, Russian, French, it didn’t affect him. They were just different flavors of sounds. The sole trait that he couldn’t get rid of was the pitch of youth and raspiness of disuse. He resented both; they made him sound less like what the fox from the television would sound like if it should talk and more like a child. 

“He comes from the insight facility in Virginia,” his Administrator confirmed his presumption, “and we will send him back soon. He still must learn how to act around you, regardless. You do not forget your place around him even when he speaks to you, do you understand?” 

Another gesture with his hand permitted him to reply. He nodded once. “Yes, sir.” 

“Alright,” the man let out a slight huff of air as he sat back in the chair behind the desk, tapping the wood with manicured fingernails. The motion was so human that it gave Weapon pause, a minor short circuit. “You know your correct volume. Mission report: July 23rd, 2016.”

And so he recounted the mission, with as little words as possible just as they had trained him, and a craving for praise. It was easy. He’d described how it felt to take someone, something, and bring it back or get rid of it in its entirety so many times it was hard-wired into his brain.

Like they meant it to be. 

He wondered if he was allowed a warm shower after the debrief.

He interrupted Weapon with an abrupt, “And there were no witnesses?” 

“Yes, sir,” he confirmed, urgent. He was not so lazy as to break the first lesson they had taught him: no witnesses. It was a mantra repeated every time; if someone saw, take their eyes. If they were blind take their ears. “No cameras outside were online, no surveillance inside was present.” 

“What will the media say?”

With as much gentleness as he could, he cleared his tender throat. “Man missing overnight in Nashville. I tried very hard to cover up any signs of a struggle.” 

“Signs of a struggle?” One eyebrow quirked up, and a severe frown appeared on the man’s face. It made Weapon’s hands go cold. “Elaborate.”

“He did not submit quietly,” he dug his nails into the material of his fingerless gloves, “I knocked him unconscious, sir.” 

There was a bitter disbelief in his Administrator’s eyes. “What were the signs, then?”

“I struck him harder than I thought.” It was an honest answer expressed with the inflection that they demanded of him, but the content made him feel funny, feel like he’d failed. A successful mission didn’t always mean a successful aftermath. 

“You glitched.” 

It was not a question. 

He maintained his composure even with his hair standing like an adder against his skin. He could sense every single wavering strand and detect every single cleaning agent in the air. The rich apple cologne that his Administrator wore to cover his emotions was driving itself up his nostrils like so many bees into a hive. 

“Yes, sir.” 

“How much blood?” he demanded. 

“Not much.”

“Is there any damning evidence?” he laced his fingers together and drummed the pads of them against his knuckles, impatient. Something familiar and fearful beat against his neck every single time skin touched skin.

“Carson Rochester is at the bottom of the Cumberland River, sir.” If someone found it, the water would wash anything recognizable away. And even if it didn’t, there would be nothing to find. He was as good as a ghost.

The man’s face relaxed by a small margin, whether in relief or something else he wasn’t sure. Despite the ease of the expression, Weapon thought the room was still sinister. He wasn’t cleared yet. 

One thousand needles pricked the back of his neck like a finger on a spinning wheel just as his Administrator patted his desk. It was a small, unassuming sound. It still sucked the moisture from his mouth and made everything else shrivel on his tongue, which all sunk to the bottom of his stomach like a rock. Or a body in a river.

“Your hand, _щенок.”_ The Russian was clumsy and inexperienced. The proper pronunciation was there but not the practice. Everything was just so slightly off, but not horribly so. Weapon knew that his Administrator wasn’t well-versed in Russian, and he didn’t learn fast like he did. 

Fingers that resembled the wooden, knotted twigs on a branch curled in what might have been a welcoming gesture to anyone else but just reminded him in particular of a spider curling up in death.

He hesitated. Not much, just for a fraction of a fraction of a second. But that minor disobedience, that small, insignificant hiccup, mattered.

It was another glitch. 

His Administrator’s puddle-grey eyes churned into a furious sea. “I _said_ ,” he repeated with belladonna in his voice, “your hand.” 

The skin was so warm, like hovering a hand over a fire. Those tree branch fingers wrapped around his and pinched, a thumb tracing the silvery, raised burns and calluses that he’d picked at until they popped. Even the skin looked warm, tinged red and tanned, though not a deliberate tan like it had been done under the sun. The hue of his looked like an alien in comparison. 

That was appropriate, he supposed. 

“Was that so hard?” he asked with fake honey coating his teeth. “You’d think I trained you better than two glitches in less than a month. How… disappointing.” 

Weapon swallowed what felt like barbed wire and nails as his Administrator’s hand wandered up his wrist and pushed aside skin-tight fabric in favor of smoothing down upright hair. 

“You know that I don’t want to scare you,” those stormy eyes glanced at him. They betrayed the words that the mouth made, wrought with something. Something he’d seen before, something that meant there was more than disappointment. “I don’t enjoy playing with my food, Weapon. Tell me; don’t I?” 

“No, sir,” was the raspy reply. The man’s fingers were digging into the crook of his elbow, sparking small bursts of pain. This is why his Administrator grew his nails so long, manicured into blunt daggers and tended to like such. It wasn’t the first time he’d left him with crescent-shaped impressions in his flesh. 

“Good, we are on the same page, yes?” He retracted his nails from Weapon’s arm, leaving behind an already blooming bruise and four small beads of cobalt blood. “Now tell me this: what good is a gun which cannot aim and delays its fire?” 

The white desk now had a single spot of blue, and nothing more. He resisted the incessant urge to wipe it away and leave the surface clean. “None, sir.” 

He removed his hand, but Weapon’s lingered, unsure if he could move. The chair creaked. “And what do we do with a gun like that?” 

“Fix it, sir.”

The laugh was breathy, light. Condescending. “See, you get it. Look at me.” 

Those words were different. Never had someone asked for eye contact without it resulting in a strike. 

The desk rattled under a sudden, aggressive slam. _“Look at me!”_ His voice was not unlike thunder, the same thunder that shook the dark glass on the outside walls whenever the air turned metallic and sandy. Sometimes he believed his Administrator summoned it to keep him awake when he dozed, the ringing din ricocheting in his ears until it drowned out any other noise. It made sense, after all wasn’t thunder brought on by a god?

Their eyes met for the first time in a very long while.

“Dr. Schneider will be unavailable for the next week. When her replacement visits you exactly two hours from now, you will tell him you’ve glitched twice–three times.” His voice mellowed out after a long exhale. “Tell him you need to be fixed.”

Weapon retracted his hand, tugging his sleeve down over the new marks. The apple and honey cologne was souring in his nose, like the cook had left them together in the sun too long. It was a rotten, dead sort of smell. He imagined honey to be sticky, a thick water or blood. He didn’t know what apples felt like, only that they crunched when bit into. Together, the two textures seemed incompatible. It was an even worse scent.

“Do you understand?”

The sleeves of his suit were unravelling. When had he grown? Suddenly he understood why it was so difficult to breathe. His Administrator didn’t scare him. 

His Administrator would never hurt him. 

His arm stung, throbbing with an unusual amount of pain as if to tell him he was a liar. “Yes, sir.” 

“Good.” His Administrator held his chin up, and he avoided his eyes. Not once did he blink during that exchange. His eyelids felt arid and stiff. “Remember what I told you about Agent Hart, he will escort you back to your quarters. Dismissed”

A wave gave him permission to fasten his muzzle back onto his face, which slipped over his nose and settled with a click. The cold steel buckles pressed into the nape of his neck like a blade biting into skin. He breathed out fresh air and exhaled through his mouth, the first of many that would slowly ruin everything inside. Even with the small holes poked into the rim of the plastic, the openings were too small to let in enough clean oxygen.

Numb fingers touched the dirtied doorknob, pristine gold ruined by sweat and old brown blood under ripped nails. He turned it, elbow complaining quietly, but his Administrator called for him to wait. 

“Before you go,” his words got sweet and caring, like hot water poured down his spine. “I _love_ you.” 

This time his breath caught, stuck in a bear trap and held down in his throat. His hand didn’t leave the doorknob.

“What do you say back?” 

His voice was muffled and modified, made even quieter by the mask covering his mouth, though that was the point. It made him sound older, like a fox should sound. “I love you too, sir.” 

When there was nothing but a pleased hum in return, he opened and shut the door with a click. The halls were just as bleak and featureless as the room, but allowed the overpowering scents and sensations to ease away. 

Weapon didn’t really understand what those words even meant, it was just something he was told to imitate mindlessly. People in the movies said it a lot, often with a closeness and reverence that was peculiar. The physical component was there, but he couldn’t decipher what kind of emotion was supposed to accompany that. 

His Administrator would never lie to him, though, so it must be present in some way. It was genuine; he was sure of it. And reciprocated. There was no need to know what it meant.

He didn’t listen to Rabbit as he yammered, trying to goad him into reacting. He seemed to think his automatic rifle and steel-toed boots made him invincible. It wasn’t uncommon to see such an attitude, especially among those in Hydra. The amount of people like Rabbit had only grown.

It was normal, he reasoned, because most men didn’t really grasp just how fragile bones were without a gun and a bulletproof vest. 

His knuckles felt stiff. 

They were close to arriving at his quarters, distinctly marked by the thick wall of ballistic glass. In stark contrast to the neatness and precision everywhere else, the glass was messy and faded. There were multiple dents that varied in sizes from bullets–training–and the inside was foggy from frost. 

_1684589093_ was the passcode this time, the buttons made soft beeping noises each time he pressed them. It changed every time it opened, a random combination of ten numbers. His Administrator and Dr. Schneider had a special code that never changed. He wasn’t allowed to see that, he would be a witness otherwise. 

The sliding door opened with a sigh and a hiss, stopping just wide enough for one person at a time to fit through. Icy air rushed out into the hall like an airlock being released on a shuttle. Compared to the stuffy, temperate condition of the rest of the facility, he was living in a refrigerator. 

“Alright, thing. Get in,” Rabbit gestured with his gun, as if Weapon wasn’t already entering. “Supper arrived half an hour ago.”

He turned away from the wall to remove his muzzle again, inhaling the bitterness. The door slammed shut with a shudder and a bang. Rabbit knocked on his door once, trying for a final time to get a rise out of him, and moved on quickly once he didn’t react.

The floor was smooth yet harsh against his knees, though it was a pleasant texture to grasp and hold on to while his lungs caught up with the cold. His bones rattled with the impact. He rubbed his hands down his arms, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing at nothing and tugging off his suit with vicious urgency. The marks on his arms no longer stung, but they were blue from pressure and he could feel a faint heartbeat when he trailed his fingers along the thin skin.

He crawled, hunched as if to make himself smaller, on his hands and knees to the paper bowl and plastic spoon on his bed. The smell of the food inside was bland, the usual white rice and milk, though someone had been generous today and added two small red heart-shaped berries that rested on the top of a light sugar dusting. The bowl might have been hot once upon a time, but it was most often that he would be absent when it arrived and miss that window of warmth. It was no matter to him, gruel tasted like nothing either warm or cold.

A wary finger reached in to feel one of the berries, jerking away when it fell into the milk. Weapon’s brow furrowed as he picked it up, milk dripping from scarlet color that was so _bright_ ; he didn’t know they allowed food to be so colorful. He popped it in his mouth, nose scrunching a little at the strange flavor. 

Eat later and take his shower now, he decided after his stomach showed no sign of wanting the porridge. It would be better to have his substitute Moderator come during a meal rather than when he was bare and vulnerable under the water too, though it really didn’t matter. The cameras saw all of it, all of him, anyway; they designed the shower cell itself so they had no difficulty seeing anything. 

He was safe here; he wasn’t sure why he felt such an instinct to hide.

When he slowly stood, soles against frigid tiles and wearing only loose boxers that hung off his hips like they were made for a man much older than he, inside the shower and turned the single dial, the water that hit his head was just as freezing as the rest of his room. He tilted his head back, letting the spray of water massage his scalp and scarred back, and closed his eyes. Fabric latched onto skin, like a second layer.

No warm shower.

That was fine with him. Understandable, even. He’d glitched twice in one day, three times in one month, an unacceptable level of error. The numbness in his fingers and blueness in his toes always went away within half an hour, the air warm by comparison. There was no reason to be so disturbed.

He shouldn’t seek to enjoy things, is what he’d been told too many times to count. Only to use them. He shouldn’t _seek_ at all, he thought, just take what they gave him without a word of complaint and use all of it so he didn’t waste resources. He could have no shower at all, it was a luxury, and here he was thinking about how he would rather have warm water. Warm water, which was far more expensive than cold water. 

The showerhead turned off after a couple short minutes, leaving Weapon soaking in the cell, wringing out filthy, sweaty brown hair as if that would dry it. His hair always took too long to dry, too long to cut with the scissors they provided him once every two months, too long in general. Once they’d shaved it because of how much of an inconvenience it was. That night he’d gotten a cold, and a firm reminder in the form of a blade so hot that it was practically melting that sickness was a weakness not allowed to fester.

That had given him something else to think about other than his aching head and stuffed nose.

The cameras couldn’t see the way he bit his lip so hard the cut down the middle reopened in order to avoid the burning in his eyes going any further than just a sting. And that was petrifying, his eyes hadn’t done that in so long that he was stunned he remembered what it felt like. But now that it was here, it took everything in him to make it go.

An unshaved, full head of hair stuck to his forehead when he rested it against the wall, hiding his shame. All he really wanted was a smile and a warm shower, instead he was going to tell a stranger just how he’d failed.

Want. What had he become?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this time i'm gonna have a way looser update schedule, i think that played a part in my huge burnout. thursday is definitely gonna keep being an upload day, but not every week. sorry about that :c
> 
> i also feel like doing translations from russian into english in these notes make my writing a little more obvious? maybe. tell me if you want translations in the future or if y'all wanna figure stuff out yourself.
> 
> criticism is always welcome! you can also shoot me asks on my tumblr @viviixen, im not that active but i have notifications on so i'll see ya. pls drink lots of water and stay safe <3


	2. ii. august 2 2016

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ==== TW's ====
> 
> 1\. implied and mentioned non consensual drug use  
> 2\. (mild) descriptions of vomit  
> 3\. implied and direct description of torture  
> 4\. some weird touching (NOT sexual though up to interpretation) 
> 
> ==== locations in text: ====
> 
> 1 (implied): Starts at "Hallucinations were not..." Ends after the paragraph break.  
> 1 (mentioned): Starts at "The water that made its way..." Ends after the paragraph break.
> 
> 2: Starts at "The first wave of heat..." Ends after the first timeskip. 
> 
> 3 (implied): Starts directly after the second timeskip, ends at "'Do you know what the door looks like?'"  
> 3 (direct): Starts at "And then he ignited," ends at "Where was he?" 
> 
> 4: Starts at "Something mechanical moved away..." Ends at "Jarring and almost unwanted." 
> 
> PLEASE be safe. i try not to make anything too triggering but i don't know everybody.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes it's saturday
> 
> yes i should've gotten done on thursday
> 
> however, in my defense, this was supposed to be like 3k words but ended up at nearly 5.5k and i just couldn't wait a week. i dont know what happened. please help.
> 
> again, big kudos to my wonderful beta who i messaged at like 6AM her time. ur a trooper <3
> 
> please enjoy!

Today’s gruel tasted the same as it always did; the sugar made little difference. Overwhelming plainness always dominated difference. The berries, however, were exotic and so unlike anything he’d had before that he had to adjust to them. The new taste was hard to swallow without making a face, unused to the indescribable taste of both sourness and overpowering sweetness, but he managed with only a wrinkled nose.

He finished those berries, left with the insipid porridge. The sugar was more alike to sand, but the milk was rich with watered down cream. He was careful to work his tongue around the sharp edge of the spoon and keep his bite gentle. Mouth injuries healed fast, it was the taste of blood that was unpalatable. Needles, blades, gun barrels, tubes, blood. All the same: hot and metal and not dissimilar to sensing a thunderhead rolling in.

He’d always wondered what lightning even looked like. If thunder was the sound, disjointed and tardy, then he imagined a bolt to be the same. Chaotic, metallic; his mind conjured up the image of the poorly designed holograms the 5th facility had assembled in 2015 before going the simple route and pirating BARF tech. 

Weapon never saw the finished product of that theft, and he dreaded to learn. Holograms could take a life of their own, there was no limit to what you could imitate and where. 

Hallucinations were not fun, and those not created in the safety of a mind sounded even less so. It was intimidating knowing the work they might do, this time without the aid of stimulants.

The plastic spoon’s handle bent and snapped with a crisp crack, the broken piece landing in the bowl. He felt like an animal, reaching down to fish it out, flicking it aside, and licking the remaining food off of his fingers. 

It was then that Dr. Roosevelt introduced himself with a rap against the ballistic glass and an impatient, high voice. He had wheat blond hair that he greased back into a neat, refined shape and stained sleeves folded to the elbow. He was lacking the certain drone of apathy that his Administrator and Dr. Schneider did, but he couldn’t smell anything through the glass, and likely couldn’t with the passive, chilly air. The way his eyes were unfocused, not lingering on anything for more than a second or so, revealed much more than the man probably suspected, though. 

“You showered,” he stated after entering the passcode with delicate, spindly fingers and stepping into the cold room. “Oh, _brrr.”_

Like someone had stuck a pole down his back, Weapon shot up from the floor and left his half-eaten bowl forgotten by his feet. The doctor’s eyes made twin trails down his collarbones to his arms, and back to his face, at which his gaze moved with distinct haste down to the paper and clipboard. 

“Permission to speak until I leave, Spider,” he granted with generosity. “Is that the same tee they provided you before you left?” 

There was a prevalent urge to reach down his back and pull the neck of the shirt downwards until it shielded all the exposed deformities. But the man’s demeanor did not seem disgusted, or even perturbed, just like a nervous artist considering a blank canvas. So Weapon set the notion aside and answered. “Yes, sir.”

Roosevelt hummed, scribbling something down on the small clipboard with hands that shook so imperceptibly that only the pen gave it away. The black ink was bitter. “And it is… the 29th. You’re early.”

He always was, and they always reminded him. Every time they laded his checkups and patrols with remarks of _you’re early, the deadline is not for another two days, that was sooner than expected_ , and sometimes a simple, wonderful _good Spider._ “Yes, sir.”

A pale, arched eyebrow went up and blue eyes peered over the rim of metal, rectangular eyeglasses. “Why, do you not like the great outdoors?”

Thick saliva tamed a hoarse breath. “I belong here, sir.” 

And it was the truth, outside was puzzling and contrary. There were often too many variables to operate with confidence, too much input to scrutinize and sort in order of importance, not like lines of code on a computer that did as you told whenever you told. 

The pen scratched on the paper, and Roosevelt said, “Of course you don’t like it out there.” Soon that noise drowned out everything but the buzzing lights and the din of two unsynchronized hearts.

“Sir,” Weapon started after a few moments without words. “My Administrator has a message for you.” 

He set the pen down. Thick eyebrows set low on his brow and a hooked nose made him resemble some bird. A crow, perhaps. Intelligent and vocal—goodness, so loud. Crows were one of the worst birds he’d encountered on his rare ventures outside, they were always witnesses and he never knew in what language they snitched. And they always flew at the slightest sign of trouble too, fucking cowards.

“Yes?” 

The inside of his mouth was hot, but everything felt crystallized when frigid air flooded it. 

He’d figured out a long while ago that words could have tastes, so many more flavors than porridge and blueberry mush could ever have, even with a little sugar. These particular ones tasted sour and burned his esophagus like a strong mouthful of bile. 

Just three words. _Say them._

“I need fixing.”

An anticlimactic conclusion to so much internal build up, three words with little variation and a robotic, unemotive edge. Every single syllable had the same deadness, the same rot. It was perfect, and it was terrible all at once.

Roosevelt’s eyes hardened, and he whispered something that sounded like I thought this would be easy. “Fixing? Of what kind?” 

Weapon considered, how severe had his glitches been? 

The feeling of warm wetness on his cheeks, something other than frigid shower water, made his neck prickle and a strange, almost guilty, sensation tangle in his gut. Yes, they’d been severe, just unrecorded. 

“Reprogramming,” he answered with wavering confidence. “Sir. My Administrator ordered a B class reprogramming session.” 

The doctor flipped a page and wrote, and wrote, until he clicked the pen with a dramatic motion of his thumb and placed it in the clipboard's clip. His fingers worried the edge of the paper.

So he was nervous, not just hyper. Weapon could smell it now, like a bloodhound finding a maimed hog.

“A class B session takes preparation, Spider. And,” his body angled towards the ever watching, all seeing camera mounted on the wall, “well, your next mission is soon. We would have to start today in order to be done in three days.” 

“No matter,” his eyes fixated on a dark mole Roosevelt had on his left temple. “Class B is the only appropriate punishment.” It was, it was, it _was_ , it was the only appropriate punishment. He had no doubt that it should be worse, it should start now, at this very second, but the thought made his throat clog like hair in a drain.

That only reaffirmed everything.

Roosevelt sniffed and pushed up his glasses. “I see. Alright,” he held out an empty, expectant hand, “bowl and spoon.”

Bending down to retrieve his gruel felt like some show of weakness, but hesitation was an expensive price not afforded by pride. Weapon was shorter, thinner, younger, already anyway. He would be the exact, extreme opposite of intimidating if no one wandering the halls was aware of what he was. That was why his name was Weapon, not Soldat. Not Asset. 

_Soldat was too humanizing for them,_ he recalled Dr. Schneider saying in meticulously practiced Russian and with a surprising amount of venom in her voice. If asked, she would deny it, but he caught it every time. Soldier _in English implies that the named individual is a person. A man. Look at the soldiers walking into battle with their guns and helmets. That is not what you are. You are the gun and helmet._

He would be lying if he said he didn't enjoy that, the fear. It ensured some pretense of security when every person knew what he could do–what he had done, what he would do if the right person wished it. Sometimes he was a teacup trembling on a ledge, and they flicked him off to shatter, and sometimes it was an ice bucket on his head and static in his ears. All the same, it was frightening how easy it was to forget everything but the primal, feral instinct to comply.

Something always ended up stained red or blue anyway, whether it was the teacup or the ice. They were the same variable in the same equation, only differentiated by the intent behind those ten Words. 

He placed the bowl and spoon in the doctor’s hand. They were placed on top of the clipboard, like a waiter holding a tray. “Yum, porridge,” he deadpanned, observing the food inside. A side of his mouth quirked up, nose wrinkling. What was so wrong with gruel? “Do not break another spoon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Those cost money.” A scoff. “America. I will be back in about an hour with the proper materials, you go back to your,” he gestured to his bed with its towels and blanket, “nest.” The bed was shoved in the corner, two walls watching over Weapon as he slept. It had once been in the very middle of the room, where the camera could most easily see, but he had pushed the slab away because he was vulnerable. Though he thought it looked more comfortable than those tall, fluffy things, it could be described as a nest. That wasn’t really his fault, though, he liked sleeping with his knees under his chin.

“Yes, sir.” 

Roosevelt’s skittish eyes lingered on his face for too long before he cleared his throat. “Right.” An awkward word. He turned, pulling aside the door to step out. It closed with the signature noise, the memorable displacement of air. No one ever closed the door while they were in the room with him, a precaution. Just in case.

He was close enough with paranoia to see it as it was. 

The bed didn’t seem appealing now that he knew what would come.

The heater started up with a whirr and then a loud hum, pipes crackling in the walls to expand alongside the new warmth in them. They needed his brain stimulated, not on the verge of hibernation like it was in his little freezer, and so they dispelled the chill to replace it with something more appropriate, something to make him more awake.

To be so cold and then so warm that he sweated was always strange. It was confusing to have his hands shake with pent up energy and to want to talk so fast and so much that it hurt to keep his mouth closed, and it was especially frustrating to try to sleep while he was buzzed on the high temperature alone.

The first wave of heat still came, though, and an ocean of nausea brewed as everything else in his body realized that he was no longer so cold as to shut down any moment.

He jerked up to walk on shaky legs to the shower cell, bony knees digging a dent in the tile. His shoulders quaked with the first heave, which burned his throat. Perhaps this was how dragons learned to breathe fire. 

The milk and all that sticky heat in his mouth went with the second heave. His tongue felt like a plump, charred slug against his teeth, and he bit down hard on it. 

This was why he abhorred the warm air, with his mind’s awakening so did his digestive system. And his stomach, drained of porridge and fluoride-laced water, always complained in the form of throwing a tantrum.

Along came the third heave with yellow bile, a vicious mockery of the striking taste of those ruby berries, and a croak. He stayed crumpled in the shower until he settled, hollow and dizzy. Frost on the glass evaporated and filled the air with vapor. The ribald smell of vomit made his head spin. His senses were going haywire with the sudden change in environment. The perspiration clinging to his skin felt like microscopic thorns in his pores which stifled spry lungs and glued his shirt to his sides. The tiny, animalistic voice in his brain told him he was drowning. How utterly dismal hyperthermia was. Tugging on the hem to make his pronounced ribs less evident peeled the threadbare fabric off of his furnace skin like a sticky note from a desk.

He loosed a weighted breath, and gagged again. 

## ⎊

Everything else was gradual, though his stomach still couldn’t handle the trite porridge. A hand reaching up to find wetness on his forehead on the nape of his neck was common, his face was flushed and flamed in blue. 

He noticed early on that the white walls had so many more hues then the barren exterior suggested. There were no words to describe them, they were shades in between every color imaginable. He spent an inordinate amount of time with his eyes fixated on them, once boring walls so full of wonder that he couldn’t help the animalistic fascination. Sometimes the colors changed in between blinks as the light shifted, like rippling fabric. It was simply, wonderfully hypnotizing. 

And the sounds, god, the sounds. The usual cacophony of light fixtures and humming of other tech outside the walls of his quarters was a roar most days, it was the only noise for hours. It was hard to not find it loud when without it there would only be veritable, deafening silence. But now there was so much _other_.

The guard behind the 40 millimeter glass had chewing gum that popped when he sighed. He spoke to his friend about how ridiculous it was that smoking wasn’t allowed inside the building, but his friend always shifted–how noisy had fabric been and he had never noticed?–and said that it was a genetic and combat facility. Of course his Administrator didn’t want smoke and coughing. There was always a noise of derision proceeding that remark.

The doctor two halls down was having issues making rats react to certain vibrations in the air, their prefrontal cortex was too underdeveloped but human experimentation required an unaltered specimen with time to develop an attachment to each unique vibration. Quite possibly a child from outside the facility, but the doctor was averse to bring in his own daughter. She was more important to him than his experiments, he explained more than once.

It would be a privilege, Weapon thought. An honor to be in that lab. 

The faucet in the kitchen was still running, he could hear the water in the pipes. Squealing knobs turned it warm and then cold, probably someone washing their hands.

The water that made its way in a metal bucket to his room always tasted different during preparation, and he knew that it was not just water. But they pretended, they said _drink up, hydrate,_ so he pretended too. It was better than the holes in his biceps from needled syringes and precise slices in his forearm to see if the clear, acrid substance worked fast enough for Dr. Roosevelt’s liking. Somehow his throat was always left drier than before within only a couple of minutes, and the colors would start dancing behind his eyelids. Yes, certainly better than the needles.

And, of course, there was all the noise in his own room, which seemed so small now that he could hear just how large the facility was. From his heart beating a steady drum, to his stomach protesting the lack of food, to the sound of his feet pacing against the floor, the walls, the dusty ceiling. _Thump, thump, thump,_ each footstep sounded like a falling tree, though he knew if someone walked in it would be as noiseless as everything else. 

He knew what would come, he did, but that didn’t mean all that extra was necessarily desired. The ambient noise of his own thoughts was painful enough, where once they’d been sluggish and tired now they were bouncing off walls that didn’t exist, his mind an open plain of neverending chatter.

His jaw truly did hurt from staying locked lipped and sealed. He wanted to yell everything out, but instead he chewed, swallowed, and puked it back up in the form of milk and rice. Sometimes he pressed his muzzle into his face as a reminder.

But despite the buzzing, despite the vibrant colors in the white that no one else could see and the whispering of his lungs, despite everything being so alive, there was still that festering something in his stomach–something that felt undoubtedly familiar. Dread wasn’t the correct word, it was too short and friendly for the something that it was. This was a prolonged feeling, eating at his organs until he couldn’t so much as look at his bidaily bowl of gruel anymore. It was unique, it was unreasonable, and it was an intimate companion. 

He’d put those words in his Administrator’s mouth– _class B reprogramming session_ –so it wasn’t fear. Maybe at first it had been, but he couldn’t remember his first session. Even if it was, it hadn’t returned. He was safe here, he’d never been scared. It wasn’t in his code, those parts of his brain just weren't there. It would be a mutation, a glitch, a drastic, unexplainable malfunction if his heart picked up with anything other than adrenaline from a hunt.

Not fear, something different. 

When he put his nose to his old shirt, sweaty and thin, he smelled it. 

It was corrupted, rotten, filled with maggots and worms like a corpse, it’s scent even worse. It was peeling flesh and glazed, unseeing eyes and chewed eyelids and so much electricity. Silent, swift lightning, an adder of a sensation with a nasty, venomous bite. It was something that left blisters and well known, well worn though not prideful scars. Oh, yes, it was familiar.

Shame and acceptance didn’t go together at all.

 _Three days,_ Dr. Roosevelt had said in his fake monotone voice and southern American accent. _We would have to start today in order to get done in three days._

Today was the third.

## ⎊

They led him, hands squeezed behind his back and with a gun against his neck, to the Dark Room. His lungs strained against the bandages, steeped in viscous, warm sapphire. Walking lit his tendons, like they were torturously being pulled apart nerve by nerve, and he wanted to scream whenever the guard directly behind him saw it fit to shove the barrel of the gun directly against the knob of his spine, where a shiny piece of dug out metal strained against the gauze. It was diamond shaped, inset almost directly into bone, with two crystal orbs. One blinked green, active and monitoring.

It had not gone off. Yet.

His lips were cut, and all he could really taste was blood. They had almost split his tongue, only stopping when he’d silenced himself. He was so proud of being quiet this time, so proud of being as little of a nuisance as possible. Azure was pooling against his chin inside his securely fastened muzzle, splashing against his mouth whenever he was jostled.

Bruises flamed a face that had once been pale, marble skin only colored by blossoms of blue on his nose and cheeks, but they’d let him look at a mirror long enough to see where they’d gripped his scalp so hard that his skin tore and seized his jaw so tightly that it ruptured into purple and blue spots. Long enough to see that the session was working.

Wires dug into the crease of his fingers, slicing the webbing between them with brutal consistency. It had taken fifteen minutes to wrap them snug enough that they cut, and would take even longer to unravel with the wetness.

“Do you know what the door looks like?” The guard with the gun asked his three companions. 

“Black,” Rabbit grunted back. “The boss will be waiting by it, don’t worry.”

He hissed when his ankle rolled against the unyielding floor, and was earned another stab to the back. A bright flare of heat sparked and exploded, like the gun had triggered a tripwire, and ran up the rivers of flayed skin where it popped and lingered on old scars that they’d reopened and layered up on. 

The guard opposite of Rabbit on his right, face and mannerism unremarkable, twisted his arm upwards to stop him from stumbling. He barely resisted inhaling blood with the silent gasp that escaped his lips.

It took precisely 234 steps to reach the black door, where his Administrator greeted the guards in an uninterested voice. He swiped a badge, and it swung open. How that door never broke its hinges, Weapon would never know. 

“How did it do?” his Administrator inquired, flicking on the lights. 

This room was less pristine and polished then the rest of his wing, contraptions left half finished and pipes exposed. The walls were a nasty, moldy green and one long table occupied the entire west wall. There were never any papers on it. 

But in the middle, oh in the middle, was the jewel of the space. A long metal chair guarded on each side by tables of the same material was positioned under a hulking Machine with two clamps that somewhat resembled oversized defibrillators. On the top and bottom of them were clamps with towels layered on the ends and taped in place. Just above the head of the chair hung a helmet of thick, flat metal sheets bent into a semisphere. Finally, there was a black screen sat like a crown on top of the entire thing that seemed like an ancient 2000’s computer. 

The Machine was a monstrosity of exposed bits and pieces, a rainbow of wires visible without protection. It had always been and always would be menacing, filling the relatively small room with it’s mere presence.

Weapon didn’t know it’s name, that was classified after all. But it didn’t need a name, it was simply _the Machine._ No word could do it proper justice, nothing was quite enough to describe the awful aura it seeped into the air.

“We had to get in it’s mouth,” Rabbit stopped and spoke up. “Then it got real quiet. Stayed that way.”

A noncommittal hum. “Good. Hope you didn’t beat it up too bad.”

“It’ll live.” 

He would, he’d had worse. 

Another hum. “Doctors Schneider and Roosevelt will arrive in five. Prepare him.” His Administrator pushed up a second lever next to the lightswitch. 

The Machine made a series of clicking noises, each in a different decibel, before it whirred to life with a huff. The computer screen jumped to live, blue with the words _𝚍𝚊𝚝𝚎 𝟸0𝟷𝟼 𝙰𝚞𝚐. 𝟸. 𝚂𝚙𝚎𝚌𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚗 𝟷𝟿𝟿0 𝙰𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙽𝙰 "𝙿𝙱𝙿" 𝚆𝚎𝚊𝚙𝚘𝚗 𝟷𝙱-𝟷𝟷 (𝟸00𝟷). 𝙲𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚜 𝙱 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚍_ typed in white font.

The guards hesitated. One minute had already passed.

They manhandled him onto the chair. The chain connecting his cuffs disconnected by pulling it apart, the potent magnet deactivating, and the second his wrists touched an indented square in the side tables he was secured. 

“Tug,” one guard told him. 

He tugged. Nothing moved. _Click_ went his other wrist. To restrain his ankles, they just lifted two claws hidden in the chair and snapped them closed. He tugged upon another order, and again nothing came of it.

Vibranium was a loathsome mineral.

A fat, rough hand took his throat and pushed it against the chair. A small growl ripped from his throat, and his Administrator made a noise from across the room. “Do not choke it,” he scolded, though he sounded entirely indifferent to whether or not he was being strangled or not.

Three minutes had passed.

The collar was by far the thickest of the six braces, specifically designed to render him motionless. It loudly closed around his neck and deflated with a chink. Air tainted by blood did not smell pleasant.

He kept his blurry vision focused on the door, even when the same hand pressed the back of his head into the cold metal chair and fastened a leather strap around his forehead. While the collar was the most bulky, the strap was the most painful, especially with his torn scalp and the impression of fingertips on his temples. 

Four minutes.

They unwound his bandages, exposing his wounds to the air. He took a sharp breath, face coloring in chagrin.

Five minutes.

His Administrator inhaled sharply as the door swung and in came the two doctors. “Schneider,” he greeted with forced, false cordiality. “Roosevelt.”

Dr. Schneider had always stood out, especially so in this dreary room. She had long platinum blonde hair that cascaded down wry shoulders like a waterfall when it wasn’t tied up in a bun. Her chin was a soft rhombus, and the bridge of her nose was narrow and prominent. Serpentine green eyes were smart and composed underneath dark glasses. Those glasses were a staple of her image, though they were only worn around his Administrator. He suspected it was because her eyes were truly a window into her soul. _Why would she hide them,_ he always pondered with a fair dose of jealousy. _How wonderful it would be to feel that strongly, to feel at all, only to cover it up._

She and Roosevelt wore the same dark coats today, though her’s swallowed her frame. 

The air suddenly grew so tense that a spoon could cut it. 

“He looks dead,” Dr. Schneider observed in a snappish tone. Her prevalent German accent made her clear voice distinct against the overwhelmingly North American majority in the facility. It was recognizable and pleasant, though authoritative. Overall interesting to listen to. This was something she knew well.

“It,” his Administrator corrected. “It is not dead.” 

Weapon swallowed.

“Right.” He could hear the hidden jeer in that word. “Well, get on with it.”

In an effort to remain dignified in front of her, he lifted his chin as high as it would budge. She only frowned.

“Alright, Doctor. _Любовь.”_

The guards moved away from the Machine like they’d been shot at. 

_“Друг.”_

His lungs expanded. Adrenaline caught up with him and flooded his senses with sirens. 

_“Холодный.”_

His breaths got quicker, tighter, involuntary hyperventilation setting in.

_“Навсегда.”_

His eyelids snapped shut.

_“Цель.”_

The chair leaned back and the helmet compressed around his skull. 

_“Нам.”_

The defibrillator-like contraptions followed suit. They pressed his ears into his head and muffed all sound. 

_“Игрушка.”_

All sound but three. 

_“Доказывать.”_

Familiar. 

_“Десять.”_

Beeps. 

_“Кусать.”_

And then he _ignited._

_His spine lifted off the chair in an unnatural arch. His blood was gasoline, the oxygen in his lungs smoke. He gasped and muffled a scream, bottom lip erupting with the force of his bite._

_Cruel, relentless tongues of unfiltered agony licked up his back and shoulders and sunk serrated teeth into his wrists, gnawing and sawing. Not even his fingers were spared from the torture, twitching against the wires, which alit and peeled the skin around his nails. A white hot stripe seared its way into skin, making a beeline for the metal around his ankle. It never reached, but it’s trail was well remembered by the river of deformed skin. Tender nerves exploded, popping like firecrackers. Someone had dropped a hydrogen bomb in his chest, and he was the city that it leveled._

_The fetid scent of charred flesh reached his covered nose, and he coughed up the sob that had been scrabbling for freedom in his throat._

Please, please, please.

Please make it stop.

_The next breath never came._

_He thrashed, crying out, body contorting like it had any chance to escape. It twisted and pulled and trembled under wretched flames. Nails dug into palms, seeking a distraction, but nothing was more excruciating then his veins being scorched._

The air was methane, methane, methane _that had a lighter taken to it and he was at its heart._

 _He managed to inhale again and the scream shredded_ everything _, snapped his vocal cords in two, pierced his eardrums. Obese tears eroded paths into his skin._

 _Something squeezed his temples, they were_ walls, walls, walls. He was trapped, he was stuck, it was too small, everything was dark.

_Another beep, another bullet ripping through his back. He was a roast, a feast, his body was the main course and it was being skewered over a roaring campfire. He was being eaten alive._

Drowning, drowning in a lake, _in a trough, his head is underwater, he’s upside down with a cloth over his mouth,_ please.

_Hot metal flooded his mouth, strangling already airless lungs in blue blood._

Stop, stop, stop stop stop stop stop.

_Metal buckled under his fingers, his molecules folded inside out and disintegrated._

_And when it was done ravaging his body, monstrous, gruesome razors tearing meat off bone like a vengeful abomination, his mind shattered and melted and–  
_

Where was he?

Strokes of striking color erupted in his retinas as he blinked, like he was watching a painter color the world with an airbrush. A shrill bell in his ears went off, taking the form of buzzing white fluorescent lights and multiple disjointed voices coming in bits and pieces. A word here or there, strong and then reserved, inconsistent. 

Everything dulled, and he was staring up at a white ceiling. The kaleidoscope was gone and supplanted with something much more manageable. 

He knew the ceiling.

The Dark Room.

A face moved into his limited view, features defining themselves the more he cleared hazy fog from his vision. The man had high cheekbones and a rounded square for a jaw. Thin brows carved a neutral, restful consideration into his aged face. What identified him was the wolfish icy eyes hooded by sparse lashes and accentuated by stretched, pulled wrinkles that stared down and blinked at him. 

His Administrator. He’d recognize those eyes anywhere. 

Something mechanical moved away from his head.

A soft, uncalloused hand rested on the bare half of his cheek, and those eyes moved closer. The man’s head tilted, studying something on his face. A breath escaped his lips and Weapon could feel it on the bridge of his nose.

Every single hair on the back of his neck stood against a thick collar while his mind screamed nonsense at him. It was his Administrator, his Administrator was a benevolent god. He ignored that throbbing headache and leaned into folded fingers, cherishing the approval he discovered in cloudy blue eyes so close to his own chocolates. It felt like a cure. 

Another hand gripped his jaw and removed his muzzle with a dull click. He discarded like rubbish. The full weight of the palm came down on him like a blanket. A finger pad brushed sliced, swollen, sore lips and cleaned up blue blood. “We’ll get you fixed up,” the man whispered in hushed, beautiful words that caressed Weapon’s eyelashes. “How do you feel, _щенок_? How are your emotions?” 

“What emotions, sir?” 

The hand patted his cheek, causing blistering flowers of fiery pain to light up his no-longer-numb face with gunfire, and his Administrator stood. Compared to the closeness of before, that distance was jarring.

Jarring and almost unwanted.

A satisfied smile was all he got in return before the man turned his shoulder and waved for the guards to release him. They got to work, he couldn’t place why he felt like the man with wrinkles so deep they were ravines and grey eyes felt so unique. He didn’t know why he expected him to talk with a silver tongue and prod him until he was boiling. 

First went the forehead restraint, then the collar, then the cuffs which were strong jaws locked onto raw, azure wrists, and last the ankle braces that squeezed his bones with such force that his skin gave way under the pressure. He inhaled, ignoring the intense pain that came with moving his shoulder to sit up, and hissed inaudibly when his wrist gave way under his body. The second attempt yielded more success.

Dr. Schneider’s bright emerald eyes were heavy when finally he sat up with a grunt. Her glasses were nowhere in sight. Dark, bruised circles under her lids held the immense weight of the orbs inside their sockets. 

Her gaze followed his Administrator out of the room, and Weapon’s avoidance of it when it rested on him was deft.

“Good Spider,” she praised in a gentle voice, like she was speaking to a baby animal that might bolt any minute. “Good _boy_.” 

He’d never remembered her so… 

Sad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HYDRATE OR DIEDRATE *throws water bottle*


	3. iii. august 5 2016

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IVE POSTED ON A THURSDAY like ONLY two weeks after the last chapter. tbh i expected there to be a big gap im proud of myself man
> 
> another thanks to my beta, i will never stop giving her love in the notes. i just jump her like a day before and she asks no questions. ilysm gal
> 
> enjoy!

_“G_ _oddamnit, Stark,”_ Fury growled into the screen, a frown that FRIDAY sneakily likened to that of a Persian cat carved into his features. _“My men have been picked off like flies since 2014. The pattern is there,”_ the man sat back in a cartoonishly exaggerated chair, something a supervillain from a movie would proudly twiddle his evil fingers in, and broad shoulders draped with a permanent trench coat painted a picture that would intimidate if there wasn’t a cat video playing right next to it, _“and you’re saying that you can’t find a suspect? There’s nothing in that brain of yours?”_

Tony spun a circle in his wheelie-chair, accidentally knocking over a wrench precariously perched on the ledge of the large metal table he was sitting behind. The noise of disapproval that came from Fury made him involuntarily smirk. He took a big, slow bite of the Cliff bar he’d been nibbling at for the entire call. “Nay, Captain. I have nothing on your infestation problem. Thanks, though.”

_“Are you shitting me? You have the world’s most advanced AI technology and you can’t find anything? With two years of data?”_

And it wasn’t even like he was bullshitting Fury, either. It frustrated Tony to find an astonishing, incredible, monumental amount of zilch no matter how many times he ran numbers and illegally tracked people. He was merely better at hiding that frustration behind purple aviators and a press smile than Fury was. He remembered Clint and Wilson drawing big black marks and an eyepatch over the eyes of Mr. Clean one day and placing the photo with care in Fury’s office, where it remained for a week before the man noticed and threw it out. Clint came bringing very sad news and a broken picture frame that evening. It remained in the kitchen until Pepper demanded it out.

Fury thought he was good at bullshitting. Key word _thought._ Tony was a bullshit connoisseur, and _he_ thought Sir Angry Pirate was sorely lacking.

“I can’t do anything, Ragetti. Your pest is smart, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had an invisible mutant on your hands.” He spun again, and FRIDAY played another cat video on mute. This one was of a cute little white kitty sniffing the camera, presumably only to be scared later. She had gained quite the collection, and he was grateful for that. It was the only entertainment his undernourished mind had access to for the last hour. “The only thing I can confirm is that the 2014 data purge wasn’t all too successful and that Hydra is precise but unsubtle. But you already knew that.”

 _“Agent Rochester was on vacation with no connections to SHIELD other than a burner phone and a badge. Now he’s gone. Agent Dawson was the same. And you met Lovell, yes? All within half a year. They’re going faster than we can train new ones.”_ Fury folded his gloved hands, chin tilted up. It was some power play, trying to be imposing like that with an untarnished ebony uniform while Tony sat in sweatpants and oil in his hair. But when he did that every time he called, it lost its effect, if it had any. 

“I’m perfectly aware. But frankly, Saint Nick, SHIELD doesn’t exist anymore,” he spun again, kicking off of a drum with a giant mess of lights and holograms hovering above, and broke into a smile when Fury scowled. “And Stark Industries had no ties to it, even if the Avengers did. Cap helped you for his war buddy, I ain’t helping no more you unless you kidnap someone.” 

_“There’s surely something you can do. You’re Tony goddamn Stark. You could track an invisible mutant. Lives are at stake.”_

Tony sighed, melting into the cushion of his chair. He caught his rotation with a squeal of wheels and placed both feet on the ground. “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” A hand gestured to his grand lab in a state of disarray. Blueprints on hiatus decorated the wall like paintings in an art gallery, harsh lights made the space seem otherworldly, and decoy models of hundreds of projects–Cap’s shield, Wilson’s wings, impact boots for Wanda and hidden knife compartments for Natasha, arrows and bows and even a prototype of Thor-conductors for teamwork purposes. The freshly dubbed Rescue and War Machine and salvaged scraps of Ultron, VERONICA looming in a bulletproof glass case–all of it a result of a building need to create and improve. “I put all this on hold for you and your secret society boy band. 2014 wasn’t just a hit on SHIELD, it was a hit on the world. Barton nearly lost his family because of the infodump. I’m Tony Stark, and I’m a stubborn fuckwad, Fury, so when I say that I can’t do anything it means _I can’t do anything._ FRIDAY, tell him.” 

_“I have done multiple hour long studies on the patterns concerning the deaths of your agents, Director, but not enough information has been acquired to detect a culprit or place of origin, only that the most likely suspect is Hydra,”_ FRIDAY politely explained. _“Unless data of a different nature is acquired, there can be no further procedure.”_

Fury sighed, scornful, and fell silent for a good two minutes. _“Agent Rochester had a wife and three children, Stark. Just like Barton. Jennifer Rochester knows you’re on the case and contacted me a while ago saying she only wants a body for the funeral if she can’t get justice. Can you at least do me that?”_

Just like that, he deflated. These conversations were the top thing on his ‘Cons of Being a Badass Superhero’ list, _numero uno_ of detestation, nothing could ever beat it. He knew how Fury felt, how he was feeling, because for every agent that had disappeared off the face of the earth since 2014 it was one less family without a member, one less kid without a parent, one less person in the world. And it fucking sucked. It sucked hard. 

Sometimes he wished he had the mental fortitude to keep his heart light and free like Steve, or mindful like Natasha. Iron Man did his best to prevent damage, but that meant that the cleanup was only more brutal a toll. 

“Yes,” Tony said with certainty. “I can do that. But no more, _inteso?”_

_“Good.”_

The call ended, and so did the cat videos. He let out a breath that sounded more like a balloon being flattened then a sigh. The time he’d been talking to Fury flashed on the screen, one hour and forty minutes, once, twice, before the hologram closed and left the room just a little less enveloping than before. Fury wasn’t a scary person to talk to, Tony knew his place, and it was not a position in which he should be worried because of SHIELD, rather just an unpleasant presence in a room that his mind sheltered away in a category meant for safety and relaxation. The Director was a pissy person though, even if he wasn’t scary, so if Tony declined the call to move to a separate room the conversation would immediately start with a question that even he didn’t quite have an answer to. How could he explain to someone that, despite owning multiple houses in Malibu and a tower with too many floors to keep track of, his lab felt more secure than a bedroom or a vault?

He couldn’t. Those were emotion-words, the type of words that had eluded him all his life. They were sneaky, English itself was ridiculous, and the wrong emotion-word either failed to explain something entirely or caused problems that, for once, Tony wasn’t equipped to solve. There was a phrase for everything in science; theories, hypotheses, laws, but there was no phrase for the feeling of careful, steady caution when he was by all means untouchable in his ivory spire filled with some of the most dangerous individuals in the world, individuals that he regarded as a makeshift sort of family. 

There wasn’t even a word for what the Avengers were besides, well, the Avengers.

Half of the reason he felt such unease, Tony thought, was the exact issue that Fury was facing now. Because for all the quiet peace the world had this year, he couldn’t help but feel like something was on its way. 2015 was Ultron, 2016 already yielded the U.S. getting shit from foreign governments for Steve’s antics, but there was something else brewing. Maybe aliens again. Maybe it was the little Winter Soldier Mark II that was terrorizing Fury.

God, he hoped it wasn’t aliens again.

He cleared his throat and clapped, putting a smile back on his face. It was a weighted smile, a ball and chain attached to its end like a cruel game of tetherball, but it was something other than a harsh, discontented line, and not nearly as vulnerable. “Thanks, baby girl.”

 _“For what, sir?”_ FRIDAY inquired cheekily, automated emotion sounding almost real with its Irish lilt and amused tone. She got a kick out of making him say what he meant in exact words, like he was a kid that had a problem with being vague. He supposed that was true.

If it were anyone else, he would make a snappish remark and ignore the question, but it was FRIDAY. She wasn’t a mother in the way JARVIS hadn’t been a father, but she was someone that was always in his corner. A sister.

“Trying,” he said with a shrug. 

_“Oh, of course, Boss.”_

Simple, direct. _Oh, of course._ Like there was nothing else that had passed her mind.

Oh. Right.

He groaned as he sat up, palm pushing on his knees and shoulders complaining. It felt like how metal grinding against metal sounded; irritating, painful, perhaps someone running a dull butter knife down his spine was a more apt analogy. 

_“Shall I start running numbers?”_

The sweat on his hands disappeared with a quick swipe to his pants, but the nervous clamminess still remained like a lingering infection. Fury wasn’t scary, but he sure wasn’t easy. And, if he was honest with himself, he wasn’t looking forward to searching for a body.

Carson Rochester wasn’t yet publicly dead. The local police force in Nashville were still treating it like a missing person case, scavenging cameras and interviewing possible witnesses, when all evidence pointed towards simple, calculated elimination. No one saw anything except for some blood in an alleyway just outside his house, where his wife said that he was stopping to take a cigarette break. He was a good man, didn’t want his kids to share his habit, so he went where the smoke would not reach them.

It was like every other story. One second alone, and they disappeared forever. Just a moment, and everything fell apart in the most horrifying show of sparks and fire. It was a rock being thrown into a stained glass window just as the sun disappeared below the horizon, a mess of rainbow glass shards on the ground of the cathedral with no sunshine to alleviate the fright. 

And then, when dawn finally came again, the crime scene was already cleaned up like it was never there in the first place.

He was familiar with the feeling.

“Yeah, get on that.” He didn’t bother to push in his chair. “I need some fucking coffee.” 

## ⎊

One, two, three.

Bullets hit home on wood easily, tearing past and falling short against the padding of the opposite wall where they dropped dead on the floor. Triplet holes created a line down the middle of the human-shaped cedar plank. Head, chest, stomach. _Dead._

A brief tap gave him permission to reload the glock. He threw the shell on the ground, where it made a small ringing noise that lasted far too long in his ears then it did for the observers in the room. To anyone else, it was a bell, a slight, simple sound, but for Weapon it was a whistle.

“Again.”

One step to the side, he put his hand back into position at the side of the firearm, making sure his grip was gentle and unextraordinary as to not damage the fragile metal, and pressed the trigger with a careful finger; one, two, three. 

The recoil was minimal, his elbows just tensed and relaxed at the movement, and the gunshot was somehow quieter than the shells emptying on the floor. It was muted, like his head was shoved underwater. Perhaps it was just the desensitization. 

Head, chest, stomach. _Dead._

Wood splintered, crackling, and flopped to the ground. Flat dummies always sounded different when they fell upon tile, hollow and lifeless and light. There was no squelch, no whimper, no weight to it, just a piece of log and the floor.

Wholly unsatisfying. 

“Again,” his Administrator commanded, watching Roosevelt write something on a clipboard from over his shoulder. 

One, two, three. Head, chest, stomach. _Dead._ As elementary as reading. 

Roosevelt’s lips were noisy when they parted. “Do you have any shoulder pain during the recoil?”

He rolled the mentioned shoulder. His muscles were a hive of wasps, rivers of provoked bees marked into bare skin with buggish legs creeping along the unaffected expanses of white just as a little reminder. Goosebumps.

It wasn’t cold in this room, not like his quarters. It was perfectly average, not bitter but not sweet. The thermostat next to the reinforced sliding door and to the right of the thick window read a normal 65 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a little more unforgiving than most rooms, though he supposed that the harsh white suns on the ceiling gave off their own coldish sort of temperature. 

Those lights weren’t as terrible as those in his room, the walls were tall and menacing, and less glare from white light on white walls reached eye level. The hallway made sure the rest of the room wasn’t pitch black, glass glowing from the fixtures outside.

“No.” Roosevelt drew an X with two adroit strokes. 

His Administrator made a guttural sound, eyes returning to Weapon’s back. “Good,” he praised, voice tiresome and heavy. 

Something unusual about the Debug Room other than its ceiling was its location. They layered the wall to the right of him with concrete and soundproof pads. It was at least a couple feet thick and impenetrable. Even past the enclosure of this room, there were no windows poked into it. It was a cogent wall that did its job with little difference to any of the other walls. No, what was so special was the sounds outside. There were birds, crickets, an occasional rusty old motor puttering down an unseen dirt road. It wasn’t artificial buzzing, or footsteps, it was grass and sky and _animals_.

“Again.” 

But he belonged here, and so he pulled the trigger again.

This time the metal diamond directly on the knob of his spine let out a shrill whine, digging needles in his ears and pulling blood back out as a perverse souvenir, and administered a swift shock. It was a chaste buzz, no elaborate electricity or flying sparks. It pushed the air out of his lungs and pulled at his shoulder blades. 

Weapon’s aim remained steady despite the jolt and subsequent tame arm spasm. The line of holes kept its rigidity. Precise, sanguine, a little delayed though even if the fake wood person were a real target they would be dead before they hit the floor nevertheless. 

One, two, three. Head, chest, stomach. _Dead._

And it did hit the floor, with a clatter and a rattle and a reminder that this was just debugging. They were making sure the hole in his head wasn’t so big that he forgot his programming.

“Good!” 

How a simple word could light such a wonderful violet flame in his chest, he would never know, but it always breathed warmth onto his cheeks and fingers. It spread slowly, a cotton-fingered flu clogging all that space in between his ribs, and it didn’t ebb until sometime after.

Something indefinite creeped up the nape of his neck and bit into plush skin when his Administrator rested a kind hand on the same shoulder that Roosevelt had been apprehensive about. It was still weak through the bandages and burn cream, and gave a little under the ponderous grip. Nails cut grooves into those bandages, it looked like a mark that a dog’s jaw might leave on a sheep’s leg.

“Seven of seven and thirteen of fourteen for basic aiming review, Doctor,” his Administrator called. 

Roosevelt was located behind Weapon with his back pressed against the wall defensively, five silent statues standing around him. Their arms were invisible, but he could feel them, ten guns and three of the guards had hunter’s knives, blades meant for carving deer meat now used for carving something entirely different. They thought that their weapons were concealed, but it was easy enough to spot a sliver of the clean hilt where they were sheathed on waist belts. 

Five guards were unnecessary, but this Roosevelt man appreciated the stone company. 

His Administrator’s hand guided him so that he was facing the man. He bent down so that he was eye level with Weapon, and threaded willowy fingers through his thick, uneven hair. “Now, _щенок,_ what did we start with this morning?” 

“My lines, sir,” he answered. He had said them after every review so far, and he considered the constant repetition somewhat useless. Even when he was small, he’d erased the possibility of ever forgetting his lines. They were nine melodic words that all started with the same letter broken up into threes by simple sentences. It was a mantra, a chant, it was an exquisite feat to break down his entire being into just a few sounds, and it was etched into the tissue of his brain as surely as a mark of love into a tree. 

“Remind me of your lines, then.” 

He tilted his chin up, placing a delicate fist over his steady heart, and suddenly everything was gone in his head.

No, gone wasn’t the correct word. Everything was hiding, curled up under big, crackling maple leaves and shivering in needlepoint sleet. He remembered, he didn’t have a choice to forget, but the sounds would not come out even when he forced air out of his mouth and caused a searing ache under his ribs to manifest once again. 

Fingers shook, and a thin thumb covered them before the glitch could be seen and diagnosed. 

His Administrator’s hand drew tense on his scalp, pulling on tissue paper skin and causing a crack straight through his skull, a cavernous fracture, an earthquake. “Your lines?” his voice was loaded and aimed, and Weapon very much felt like his veins were the hair-thin fibers of a cedar plank.

_Your hand._

Someone turned off his involuntary voicelessness, that tug on his head a simple click of the unmute button on a remote, and he’d never been so relieved to hear the sound of his emulated, juvenile voice. “I am for Hydra, a Weapon,” he began, words leaking from behind his teeth like the slithering drag of a neurotoxin. Now that there was a hole, though, he couldn’t keep it from seeping into his blood and flooding it with acid. “Silent, satisfactory, sustainable.”

One, two, three.

“To Hydra I owe my body and mind; subservient, stoic, seperated.” 

One, two, three.

“Because of Hydra, I am safe, secure, superior. Loved.” 

One, two, three.

He waited, skin aflame and mind racing, for his Administrator to say something, anything. Predatory eyes fixed on his, but did not meet. They never met.

_Look at me!_

Finally, “And you do know that I do not have to do all that, yes?” His tone was mere curiosity, there was no venom, but it cut and dug like a snake bite. 

He’d always known, and he’d always been grateful. Grateful that he’d been chosen to act out that Thinning, so glad that he was here, with warm summer hands in his scalp no matter the pain they caused, because it meant he was alive and his Administrator cared enough to touch him. “Of course, sir. Thank you so much.” 

With one last unfeeling tug, his hair was released and his chin could drop respectfully towards the floor once more. _“Of course,”_ his Administrator echoed emptily. “Of course. You’re welcome, Spider.” And to Roosevelt, who had been awaiting like a coward by the wall and watching with wary eyes, “Full marks today. Tell that Schneider woman to give it a warm shower this evening.” 

That made all the pain in his ribs and head drain.

“Thank you,” he said again, hoping his Administrator would see past his dead façade and hear the candor in his voice. It won him only a noise of positive acknowledgement, a precious diamond. Pride sprouted in his chest, and he replayed the moment while water at the very hottest setting slid down bare skin and swirled into the drain. It was a candy, a jewel, a treasure, one he did not deserve. 

Yes, his was an honest thanks, and Weapon would split every fiber of those bullet-riddled wooden people into perfect twos to see that noble, kind generosity repaid unabridged. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> list of changes:
> 
> \- fixed dumb mistakes from the previous chapters, completely my bad sometimes i edit stuff while posting which ive noticed is not a smart idea due to my -2 braincells 
> 
> \- added dates!! theyre mostly gonna be used for un-useful easter egg purposes and keeping track of timeskips better (yes that is the only thing i promise i will not use them for angst reasons *wink wonk*)
> 
> \- canonically civil war takes place in late spring-early summer. ive taken the liberty of screwing with the timeline. just know this story takes place before civil war :)
> 
> \- tony! i think one of my biggest regrets in the original fic is not paying tony enough attention. he's gonna get a lot of love this time, i promise
> 
> dont skskskskskskskskip taking breaks to hydrate or else 10 minutes off work won't be the only break in your life. yes that is a threat. love yoself.


	4. iv. april 4 2014

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ==== TW ====
> 
> 1\. graphic description of injury and gun violence
> 
> ==== location in text: ====
> 
> 1\. Starts at "Something hot and dangerous..." Continues until the end of the chapter. 
> 
> i'll summarize at the ending notes for those who skipped over this section. please be safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M BACK im baccckkkk.
> 
> this week was absolutely terrible for me but i hope this chapter makes y'all's weeks better than mine! 
> 
> an obligatory huge thanks goes out to my awesome beta! you say you don't mind but i will never stop this. i love you. take it. take it and keep my love god damnit.
> 
> enjoy!!!

T he day started out mundane and unoriginal, a replica of the rest. Eleven always woke up at 5:00 AM sharp, thirteen minutes before Ten and twenty-one before Nine. It felt secure to be the first one awake, eyes wide open like two big headlights in the dark, reflecting moonlight as if off a mirror. Harsh purpled circles weighing down his bottom lids emphasized the soft glow of an animal’s eyes in the night. He and Ten usually seized their minutes of peace for the day, no words until 5:21 and no overhead lights until 6:00. And, as expected, Nine woke up at 5:21 with an exaggerated yawn and a blink, and that silence was broken. 

Nine talked too much, that was why her skin was cobalt with marks and her muzzle had three extra latches. When she took it off, she always looked like she had something suctioned to her face, making cuts on the bridge of her nose and blue lines on her jaw. Her head had been shaved for the third time that week, even though there was no hair to shave left, only flesh. 

“They’re coming early today,” she said, confident and so real that he feared for her. She’d long since mastered plain eyes, but her voice wasn’t satisfactory. It wasn’t something like a doll, a toy, and they tried to make it so but it never happened. 

She was stubborn.

Ten opened his mouth with an inhale and a sigh. “No, they’re not. They come at six. Every day.” Eleven could hear the rustling of blankets as Ten gripped his two stolen ones, draped over the bottom bunk and touching the frigid linoleum floor. The room had one bunk, one single bed, a desk for pouring over the thick-spined books they assigned them for science and math, and a deliberately exposed hole for cleaning. 

Each bed was supposed to have one blanket, but Ten already had two in his hands the minute he spotted them, and something made Eleven not contest it. So he had no blankets, and it was better that way. He had claimed the top bunk, though, after some early skirmishes with Nine, who insisted on being high up so she could practice balance outside of training. That protest didn’t last long nor ever returned, but the resentment lingered and casted shadows on the unpolluted walls.

“Not today,” Nine insisted, looking up at Eleven with owlish honeycomb eyes and almost daring him to contradict her claim. 

He averted eye contact.

“They don’t tell us anything,” Ten reasoned with her in the structured, scripted, mellow tone of voice they’d been taught. “You haven’t even won an  _ арена. _ They wouldn’t tell you.”

She harrumphed. “I wasn’t told. I listened. The Soldiers are demonstrating something today, Schneider said so.” 

At that, Eleven perked up. The Soldiers. Oh, the Soldiers! 

“Is December back?” Ten asked, taking his words and twisting them out of his own mouth. 

Yes, was December back? He’d left only a while ago, though it felt like a very long time, and his Moderator had notified him that it was a solitary mission. He was the most conditioned, the most obedient, and so he was sent outside into the wide unknown, though not to him, alone. They’d only received sporadic, cluttered updates from the Agents on the field, the parasites in the woodwork, and the Weapons had gathered once a week to analyze them. Eleven never cared for listening to grainy audio and lectures about unpredictability, it grated on his hearing and developing obvious patterns had long since been beaten out of him, but he did listen just for a hint of when Winter would return.

Ten knew that he gave attention for the wrong reason, but understood and stayed silent. His Soldier, July, was close to him, even if they hadn’t been together long. There was always a bond between Weapon and Soldier, no matter the length of time. Nine, though, was a loaded gun. She knew, but never did stick to rules, especially those that remained unspoken. 

“I don’t know,” she replied, bitter words coupled with a sour face. “Stop asking.”

January had died only a week ago, expended as a media scare to keep the eyes off of December. January was Nine’s Soldier, and her wound was fresh and bleeding. She was horrid at keeping the resentment from her face, out of the air, it permeated the room whenever the topic was brought up like worms from the ground during a rainstorm. He dreaded that her mouth would split open as well. 

It was the cause of a tense string of disdain connecting them. She was weak, weak for being upset at something so trivial, weak for being angry, weak for getting attached. And she knew, she knew because she was smart but so, so flammable.

Ten asked again. “Do you know?” He peered up at Eleven through milky blackness. 

“No,” he said back, voice faint and words simple. Duteous. 

“Huh.”

And it was quiet. The first sign of something terrible, something abnormal. 

Hair stood up on the back of his neck, ice cubes and slush slid down his spine, in between his skin, and goosebumps sprouted like trees on his arms. “Someone,” he whispered to Ten and Nine as his nails tightened in his flesh. Indeed, the stark echoing of footsteps was heard by all of the Weapons, and they could hear everyone stir in their rooms of two. The room exploded with light, a solar flare, and Eleven blinked away the dancing colors behind his eyelids.

The tip-tapping of Dr. Schneider’s suede flats was distinct and demanded the utmost attention and respect. It was accompanied by the telltale clunky boots of eight guards carrying heavy guns, armed to the teeth and adorned with helmets. Far more than was necessary. 

_ “Вставай!” _ Dr. Schneider yelled, smacking the wall of the hallway opposite to the glass doors of the Weapons’ cells.  _ “Вставай! Вставай! _ Today we have an early demonstration!” 

“I told you,” Nine hissed.

“Quiet!” She drove a leg into the floor with a loud stomp, and struck the wall again. “You will follow me and listen! Do you understand?” 

“Yes!” eleven different voices called, harmonized and robotically deranged. 

Ten shot up from the bed, and Eleven climbed down with one hand on the wall. Nine stayed against the wall, stealing all the warmth she could before the guards opened their cell door. She wistfully abandoned her blanket, and stood with the other two. “I told you,” she repeated, this time in a murmur rather than a snark. 

The buzz at the base of Eleven’s skull only worsened, a ringing and pistoning pounding substituting where there had only been weary anticipation before. He longed for that missing feeling of normalcy, the dread of the day being just like the rest. If it was different it was abysmal, and he decided that he hated hoping for difference. Their set schedule, though boring, was predictable and safe. Early demonstrations were not. 

One guard wandered to their door at the very end of the corridor, pushed in the code, and the door opened. His toes curled. No one moved until Schneider gruffly gave the order, and Nine left first with a yank. Next went Ten, easy and moldable, and then Eleven, who was lead to the front and to the left of One, an older boy with wheat blonde hair and two missing teeth. 

Schneider looked him over, and he stuck his chin up and took a breath. She was watching to make sure that his senses were working, and if she found anything awry she didn’t make a salient comment other than a  _ “Доброе утро, Одиннадцать.” _

He could feel Nine’s putrid ire from here.

She clapped once, twice, three times before signalling the guards to take up their positions. “You will be brought to chamber 2-SCC in the east wing. You will not touch, and your eyes will stay forwards! When you enter the room, you will watch silently against the wall in numeric order. Do you understand?” 

“Yes!”

So they marched down corridors and corridors, the barren pearl walls of the facility melting away into a concrete grey. The air sparked in the east wing, and a barrage of droning, ticking sounds assaulted Eleven’s ears the more they approached 2-SCC. Everything appeared more gamely, more warm, and a few bold Weapons near the back of the single file line started exchanging whispers. Schneider and the guards did not hear, only kept parading them past scientists and whiteboards filled with black expo marker and oxygen tainted with a strong, greasy chemical stench. 

The east wing didn’t have the sterile, plain sensation of the wing in which their lives were contained. It was buzzing with chatter from agents and assets, it had twice the amount of bathrooms and the frequency of seeing a narrow door marked  _ cleaning  _ decreased fourfold. It was messy, unfamiliar, and alive, but it didn’t soothe the pain rattling Eleven’s brain in his skull and yelling at him to bolt and go back to bed.

“We aren’t going anywhere,” One whispered to Two behind him. “This is all bullshit.” 

A guard butted him in the head with the handle of a gun. 

But it did seem like a lost cause when the clock’s little arm reached 6:00, and the big arm traveled to the one, then to the two. The east wing, as well as being scarily unfamiliar and loud, was so much bigger than he’d ever grasped. Eventually, the Weapons couldn’t help but look, look and talk, even when they were met with strict hushed and blooming bruises. Eleven just remained as he was, silent and obedient, because Schneider’s back was only five steps ahead and something in his gut twisted, devastated and icky, at disappointing her. 

At 6:13, Eleven spotted a plaque marking chamber 1-SCC. At 6:16, Dr. Schneider stopped suddenly at a large double door and demanded Eleven turn to face One. One wrinkled his nose at him, somewhat playful. 

One had an issue, just like Nine, with expression. All of them did to a degree, though he supposed it came when they had only half the years that he had. They’d all been brought in after a catastrophic failure in batch B leaving him the only leftover of the twelve 2001 Weapons. Batch C went underway in 2008, there was no blame for a delayed foundation but at the same time there was no excuse for a lack of effort.

He didn’t meet One’s eyes, and instead waited for the recognizable beeping and whirring of a passcode being entered and a fingerprint being scanned to turn back around. 

Chamber 1-SCC was jarring compared to the rest of the wing, though the similarity to the wide training rooms set him somewhat at ease. The walls were back to spotless white, the air stagnant and hospital-like, and the noises muffled. In the middle of the room there sat twelve opaque cylinders hooked up to a ceiling by a gargantuan tube travelling from the apex of the wide cone lid on the glass. Five latches each held on that lid. 

The Weapons arranged themselves in numeric order, putting Eleven back at the end of the line, next to Ten. 

Something whirred, and those cylinders turned until they could see the doors giving access to the inside. There was a light on the ceiling of them, illuminating the resting faces inside. January’s pod had been covered with a sheet and duct taped permanently closed, it didn’t move an inch and remained dark. 

A tsunami of energy crashed against the line of Weapons, and many sucked in air through their nose with wide eyes.

Eleven’s hands clenched, and he read every label taped on the doors of the pods.

_ August. September. October. November. _

“ _ Пауки,”  _ Dr. Schneider addressed them, voice serious and grave. “This demonstration is an important one, one you all would do well to take to heart.” 

Ten shifted, and sent him a glance. Eleven was sure he could feel the fiery, all-consuming emotion dripping from himself, a dark contrast to the astute nothingness he prided. 

She went on. “And an honor to see, yes? Now tell me, how many cryo chambers do you all see?”

“Twelve!” they shouted. Nine stayed quiet.

“And how many of your Soldiers?”

“Ten!” they shouted.

December wasn’t here.

December hadn’t returned.

_ December wasn’t here. _

Schneider grimaced just a bit, pushing up dark spectacles resting on her nose. “Yes. Now, Soldier December was on a mission for the last month. You all listened to recordings from the media and mission updates from our reconnaissance. It was a reminder of the standard you all are raised on, that was its purpose as a lesson. Now, this is a lesson in responsibility.” At that, she looked directly at him, and he froze.

“I’d like to apologize for giving you such a disgusting role model, Weapons.” 

The temperature dropped by at least twenty degrees, and the steady up and down of the Soldier’s chests increased until they stopped. 

“December’s mission was to neutralize Captain America. Instead, he helped with the fall of Alexander Pierce.” 

Sinister fingers of frost curled and spread on the glass, beads of water dripped from the outside, and soon the doors were just as opaque as the back wall. Cryostasis.

Retirement.

“Winter Soldier: December is a  _ traitor,  _ and we do not afford  _ scum _ in this program.”

The silence was deafening, but all Eleven could hear was his beating heart and hot blood roaring in his ears, a hurricane of disbelief. Schneider tipped her head at him, green eyes almost telling him that yes, this wasn’t some cruel prank.

Realization speared him, an icicle of grief twisting in his chest and mutilating everything all at once, twisting and thrashing and writhing. His heart swelled, pushing tears past his lids, and he wanted to buckle, but even his shaking knees wouldn’t allow that. Hydra had been betrayed,  _ he’d been betrayed. December betrayed him.  _

Suddenly, Nine burst up from the crowd, shoving a stunned Ten aside. She spat in his face, hatred steaming from every poignant syllable. “Serves you right!” she declared. “How does it feel to be alone? Not too good, huh?”

_ Weak, _ that’s what she said. That’s what she’d called him.  _ You’re weak, just like me. _

Something hot and dangerous washed away that cold horror, and there was nowhere to keep it except for out, out, out because it was chewing up everything inside and he was being eaten alive. 

Her jaw made a grotesque sound under his fist. 

Goddamnit, he was not weak! 

She stumbled onto the floor, clutching her crooked jaw desperately. Her hand was covered in thick blue honey that smelled like rusted tin, her eyes were as wide as the silver moon. A viscous river of cerulean flowed from a ruptured lip, and he felt sick and twisted for proving her wrong.

That satisfaction didn’t last.

The room exploded with noise, a shrill ringing, a whistle, a bell, something so terribly stabbing that he clapped his hands over his ears and shrunk and crumbled. His senses buzzed wildly, feral and vicious, and his own blood leaked between his fingers out of his ear canal. 

Over the agonizing shriek, his trained hearing could identify two guns being loaded and cocked. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t  _ move.  _ His legs were quaking, useless and liquified. He dimly registered the same reaction from the other ten Weapons.

_ “Stop!” _ Schneider screeched, too late. The triggers had already been pulled, a fate already decided.

Weak feet shuffled, feet that he did not move but were too close to be anyone else’s. He braced himself for the feeling of hot, thick needles tearing through his sternum.

Nothing came. The cry was not his.

His back was flooded with warmth, and Ten dropped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary for those who skipped:
> 
> \- Eleven breaks Nine's jaw.  
> \- Everyone is indisposed because of a sharp ringing noise.   
> \- Ten jumps in front of the bullets that are shot at Eleven as a result of his outburst. 
> 
> i GENUINELY cannot thank you guys enough. comments always make my day and kudos are worth one big ole smile!!! i love writing stuff and seeing other people like it too is surreal. thank you 3000!!!! <3 <3
> 
> DRINK SOME WATER OR ELSE THE SELF-CARE GOBLINS WILL VISIT YOUR HOUSE AND DAMPEN YOUR TOES WHILE YOU SLEEP trust me its HAPPENED


	5. so,,, you got detention

hi its me, ya boy  
  
im writing to tell y'all that i have absolutely no idea when the the next chapter of this might come out. depression hits like a train when im stuck at home and my grades tank because i don't learn well in an online environment.

ive been trying to write for a while but my brain just Cannot. im sure yall who write know the feeling, lol. i write like 500 words, go "ill do the rest tomorrow," and then look at it and delete it bc i dont like it anymore when i open it up again.   
  
even though self quarantine sucks so much ass that its indescribable, social isolation is so important right now. and if you do need to go outside, stay 6 feet away from people. covid-19 is a very scary disease and you never know who might have elderly or immunocompromised family members. my mom is one of the people at risk and we've been learning how online grocery shopping works together.

please wash your hands, make sure to laugh at least 5 times a day, pick up a new hobby or rekindle an old one. art is very therapeutic for me since it doesnt force me to put feelings into words. try doing something for yourself at least once a day.

and for yall who are having a super difficult time like i am: it's gonna get better, and you're not doing as horrible as you think you are. if you can't get out of the "i suck, everything sucks, i hate life" hole, choose one random thing (object, concept, person, animal, plant, etc.) and write down 3 things you dislike and 5 things you like about it. i've also been making moss terrariums (which require very little effort to both make and care for) because its kind of hopeful in a weird way to watch something grow when everythings so confined and scary right now.  
  
stay safe. 100%, the next thing i write will not be another chapter of this. the tone of story isnt right for my mental state now, but keep an eye out for anything new.  
  
i love y'all. i hope y'all love yourselves too, you deserve it. drink water and eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. it doesnt matter if you stay in bed all day, the only thing that matters is that you're alive and trying your best. <3

**Author's Note:**

> so this time i'm gonna have a way looser update schedule, i think that played a part in my huge burnout. thursday is definitely gonna keep being an upload day, but not every week. sorry about that :c
> 
> i also feel like doing translations from russian into english in these notes make my writing a little more obvious? maybe. tell me if you want translations in the future or if y'all wanna figure stuff out yourself.
> 
> criticism is always welcome! you can also shoot me asks on my tumblr @viviixen, im not that active but i have notifications on so i'll see ya. pls drink lots of water and stay safe <3


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